


The Three Who Remember Trees

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [8]
Category: Leaf by Niggle - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Afterlife, Other, Polyamory, The mountains that remain distant even once you reach them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-11
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2021-01-23 20:42:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21326374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: Three lives, one afterlife.
Relationships: Niggle/Parish/Mrs. Parish
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	The Three Who Remember Trees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amyfortuna (elwinfortuna)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwinfortuna/gifts).

> Last Yuletide, in 2018, I started working on a prompt with great enthusiasm, finding my way to the characters’ voices, submerging myself in a new atmosphere, a new cosmology. Then I realized I lacked the time and the ability to do justice to my own high-concept plan. I also remembered that my recipient specified “religion” as a hard DNW, and while I was 90% sure that my weird agnostic afterlife story wouldn't be a problem, I didn't want to take that risk when it came to a Yuletide gift. So instead of writing this weird character-study in a tiny fandom, I wrote different weird character study in similarly tiny fandom, which was more suited to the occasion. But preparing for this year's yuletide, I found the notes in my draft folder, and decided to post them.
> 
> So, here is a brief version of the the Somewhat Spiritual but Not Really Catholic Reincarnation Threesome Story about Leaf by Niggle.

Niggle and Parrish had been neighbours for most of their lives. When Parrish moves in next door to the cottage where Niggle had always lived, they are both young men, although Parrish’s bad leg already aches whenever the weather turns cold. There may have been a war, and he may have been wounded, body and soul. Niggle almost immediately falls for friendly, down-to-earth Parrish, loves his too-loud laugh, his unevenly chopped hair, the way his shirt sticks to his sweaty back as he digs up the vegetable patch. But Niggle’s shy and ashamed and angry and hides it all as best as he can. Parrish would not be uninterested, but Niggle keeps acting prickly and irritable, and Parrish cannot muster the patience to even befriend him. And then Parrish meets Marjorie, cheerful, hardworking Marjorie who always smells like blueberry jam, and they get engaged, and the point is moot.

Niggle has to concede that they look good together, he envies them each and envies them both together. He finds himself talking to them more, just to bask in their happiness, but in the long run, that only makes it worse. He paints a picture of the two of them, two profiles facing one another, his huge hands buried in her her copper hair, standing still but with a sense of movement as if the whole world was whirling, spinning, dancing around them. Niggle means to give it to them as a wedding gift, but he decides it didn’t turn out right. A part of him knows it’s the best thing he’d ever painted, but he can’t stand to look at it, and he can’t stand to have them look at it. Even destroying it would be an admission of something, so he just squirrels it away in the shed and tries not to think about it, tries not to think about them, as the chill is slowly settling into his bones, his heart. He watches his neighbours have a child, a lovely little boy, watches them coddle him and teach him and raise him.

He watches them lose him. The boy has hardly grown into a man before he leaves and never comes back – maybe there is a war again, maybe it’s the same war. Parrish and Marjorie grieve, and Niggle does not know how to help. He sometimes turns up with groceries, with wine, with really overcooked casseroles. It helps, but he doesn’t see how it helps, and stops doing it.

Life goes on. Parrish keeps gardening, Marjorie keeps making jams and preserves, Niggle keeps painting. They work, they age, they become stuck in their ways. Old age finds them tired grey people, people who had humble, unassuming dreams, and who now know that even those dreams have failed to come true. No laughter in the Parrish house, no grandchildren, not a single picture in Niggle’s studio that he thinks is well and truly finished. These are thwarted, lost lives, and all three of them face that with a combination of dignity and denial. They are old, bitter, resentful people who barely talk, but over the decades, barely adds up to a lot, and grudging little acts of kindness add up as well. When Niggle gets on a bike in the pouring rain to go and find Marjorie a doctor, that is, for all his whining and complaining, still an act of love.

* * *

When Niggle meets Parrish again, in the forest he himself created, they learn to know each other again, they are old friends who are seeing each other for the very first time. They work together on bettering the wonderful land around them, and at first, Niggle’s joy is dimmed whenever Parrish looks at something and says “I can hardly wait to show this to the wife.” He feels like Parrish is taking his work, their shared work, and giving it away. But then slowly he learns to see the wonder in Parrish’s face as he looks at a tree or a brook or a bird, and understands that wanting to share something with Marjorie is the highest praise he can imagine. They toil away for a long time, until time loses all meaning, until both are young men again, maybe younger even than they were when they became neighbours. It is after they spent a day, a decade-long day digging out the new path of a stream that would feed the new pond by the cottage, and arrived to an evening where both of them are weary, covered in sweat and dirt, that Parrish first kisses Niggle, kisses him soft and sweet. Then pulls back, shaking his head, saying he ought to – he ought to wait for Marjorie, and at this time, in this place, Niggle can no longer fall back on the gnawing envy that had plagued him for, oh, all his life. Parrish holds him, and he holds Parrish close, knowing that he isn’t ignored, he isn’t discarded, instead he is something infinitely precious that must be shared together, held together, marveled at together, like the tree and the bird and the brook.

Soon after – but who knows what soon means in this land – Niggle and Parrish part ways with a handshake, a wordless promise, as Parrish stays behind to wait for his wife, and Niggle sets off towards the mountains, to continue his journey and continue his work.

* * *

Niggle works alone, for ages it seems. Raises sheep on the high pastures, follows after them wherever they graze, takes them to the heights in summer and the vales in winter. He shears them, spins the wool into yarn, and makes stiff, scratchy blankets. He milks the sheep and makes soft, crumbly sheep cheese. He learns to tolerate the cold, the wind, the work. He sleeps in a tent, but builds a little stone house with his own hands, knowing that the others will need a place to stay when they follow. They’ll need a dry, warm place out of the snow, they’ll need a home and a hearth. He expects them, he waits, he hopes. And when they finally arrive, Parrish arm in arm with smiling, copper-haired Marjorie, it’s better than all holidays of his life rolled into one. They did not bring much with them from the house in the forest, but they did bring a small jar of jam that Marjorie had made. It’s fragrant and sharp and even before tasting it, Niggle knows that it was made from the fruit of the tree, his tree. He sits down and puts his head in his hands, crying helpless tears of wonder and regret. He had been painting that tree for decades on end, and it never occurred to him that it would ever bear fruit, or that the fruit would be so sweet. When the tears stop, he shakes himself – where are my manners – and welcomes his guests, has them dine on bread and cheese. When they have eaten, and the night has fallen, they take themselves off to bed – Niggle built a bed for the two of them, and a little separate alcove for himself, but there, in the desolate world above the treeline, with a chill wind whistling in the chimney, there is no room for lies. They all sleep in the same bed. Just sleep, the first night, exhausted from their long journey. But the next night, after a day spent marveling at the sheer size of the mountains, laughing at the blueness of the sky and trying to drag a particularly stubborn lamb out of a thornbush, they find their way to one another, simple and easy, and share a joy they could not have shared in life.

They live together, the three of them, for ages and ages and ages, tending to the sheep, tending to one another. They were young when they walked out of the forest, and slowly, as the decades pass, they age again, until they are once more weathered and wizened by the highland winds.

* * *

And one day, a day just like any other, they understand it is time to move on. They put their house in order and leave it for the next visitor, the door closed but not locked. Taking nothing but a warm cloak and a walking stick each, they walk and walk upwards into the mountains, higher and higher until they arrive at the crossroads. There are no roads there, nothing crosses, there is only the slope of the mountainside into a shallow dell with a small spring, but they still know it is a crossroads, because there stands a tall post bristling with signs, all offering a different choice, a different way. One sign points to the harbour, the sound of seagulls and the smell of the sea, ships loading and unloading, and a chance to set sail and find the mystery beyond the horizon. Another sign points further up, towards the heights of the mountain, proud peaks forever blinding-white with snow, and the handful of hermits who live breathing the cold, thin air above the world. Yet another points to low, rolling hills of heather, with birds singing their sparkling midday song, and quiet content folks tending jewel-green gardens. One points to a city, with its tall spires and broad avenues, bright and bustling even at night, the sound of shouting and singing rings far. Another points to endless flat grasslands where horses run for the sheer joy of speed, and their riders cheer them on, playing games of speed and valor. Another points to… there is no end to them. Niggle sees dozens and dozens, and he is really quite sure that he couldn’t count them if he tried, that there is not a  _number_ of them. He looks around idly, not ready to decide, not even knowing what he would base his decision on, and then he sees it.

The waste. An empty, dead land, not even a desert, not a natural desert of sand and stone burnt clean by the sun. This is a waste where the wind stinks and the air is poison, a land where everything green has sickened of life and will not grow. There is nothing in the waste but what was discarded, what was cast out, mountains of rubbish and caustic pools of chemical sludge. Noxious fumes and grey smoke billows over the sky, blotting out the sun. Nothing lives there… but. Oh. They do. There are people there, still living, yearning for a breath of clean air, a gulp of fresh water, a single word of kindness.

Niggle knows he has a choice, but he can’t choose anything else. He doesn’t want to go to the waste, he’s terrified and he’s already tired, he knows he’s too weak, too little, he cannot, and yet he knows that he’s meant to go there, that since the first time he put a line of paint on canvas, no, since the first time his infant eyes saw beauty in the play of light on leaves, he was meant to go there. He must go to the waste to tell people about trees. He begins to say his goodbyes to the others, shaky and tearful and certain that they’ll never meet again, but they are lost in thought, staring at the wasteland over his shoulder. “Do you think,” says Marjorie. “I’m sure,” says Parris. And they resolve to follow Niggle, not just out of love for him – although they do love him – but because they want to plant healing in the poison earth, to dig for the root that filters and breed for the leaf that shelters, to harvest the fruit of comfort and then, once they have made their way deep into the waste, they want to find their son. There is no doubt in their mind that this is the only place where he could have gone.

The three of them take one last deep breath of cold mountain air, take one last look at the radiant blue sky, hold hands, and set out together.


End file.
